simulator

Hot News from Gamescom 2013

If you’ve never been to Gamescom you are missing out, with the latest in the hardware and software sector it’s one of the years most prominent events. At Gamescom you can immerse yourself in the multi-faceted world of gaming and technology, have fun and experience all the latest game premiers. If you can’t be there, here are a few of the highlights that you might want to check out, as we get more information be sure that we’ll bring it to you here at The Gamers Blog. Here are a few of the announcements so far that I’m particularly excited about.

Firaxis prepare to upgrade XCOM with their Enemy Within expansion
Enemy Within will be available on PC and Mac, while Xbox 360 and PS3 will get the “Commander Edition” that includes a copy of Enemy Unknown and the Slingshot and Elite Soldier content packs. Set in the confines of Enemy Unknown, it’s the same game just with more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4KdSli869U

Diablo 3 unleashes new terrors, in the new expansion, Reaper of Souls
Named after its new lord of darkness, Maltheal, the fallen angel of wisdom who has now become the angel of death. The expansion will add new zones to fight through, a new class called the Crusader and raise the level cap to 70 for all of Diablo 3′s current classes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb7QJwQ58T0

Crytek’s new CryEngine
Now just called ‘CryEngine’ features revolutionary PuddleTech. Crytek’s Carl Jones explains “We have revolutionised many parts of the engine: we have overhauled our entire lighting system, built movie quality character rendering and animation solutions, vastly improved the speed and effectiveness of our Sandbox editor, and even our rendering has changed with tessellation, pixel accurate displacement mapping and now physical based rendering; all of this while maintaining our first principal: that making games should be real-time, all the time.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF1zjDSqPoo

October 26, 2012

Boldly going where no Star Trek fan has gone before

Let me introduce you to Artemis, the starship bridge simulator where you get the chance to captain your own starship along with your very own crew. There are 6 possible roles: captain, helmsman, weapons officer, engineer, science officer and communications officer – everyone but the captain (who is issuing the orders) gets their own screen and you all need to work together in your respective roles to complete the mission. Artemis is not an official Star Trek game, but it’s every Trek fans dream, just choose your role and get started.

How it works?

Whoever hosts the game is the captain, everyone else then connects to the captains computer via the IP address, and although the game creator designed the game with all members of the crew being in the same room (like a real starship bridge), version 1.1 added a server option that lets you adjust the network update speed, so Artemis plays across the internet as well and you can link up with your crew over voice chat. The game can be downloaded from the Artemis website here: https://sites.fastspring.com/artemis/instant/artemisspaceshipbridgesimulator and costs £26 – but one copy of the game is enough for a 6-person crew, this copy is onto each of the crew PCs.

There is a demo version of the game, but this only gives you the helmsman and weapons officer stations. Also, to play the full version you can just have a helmsman, weapons officer and captain, so a 3-man crew is possible.

What do you need to play?

A Windows PC (although you can get it to work on a Mac using various methods of course) running DirectX 9 and a crew.

Check out the You Tube video below for a great example of the gameplay: